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April 26, 2007

AOL: It Was a Blog That Broke Sockgate

You've read about it all day, but there it is: Gary Thorne's confident revelation that Curt Schilling used paint on his sock. (Big ups to A Red Sox Fan in Pinstripes Territory for the video.) ...

While the debate surrounding this issue will rightly center around Thorne's comments, I think it's also worthwhile to take a moment to point out how his comments snowballed into a national story. Yes, there were probably hundreds of thousands of viewers who heard him, but it was the astute ears of a blogger over at The Joy of Sox who transcribed the comments and brought them to the attention of several reporters ...

Gorden Edes, if you don't recall, took the story and ran with it, writing the definitive introduction to the controversy that the rest of the mainstream media has built on. But realize, it was a blogger who broke this.

The worst TV camera shot is the one that shows the stooges in the booth. I can ignore all the personal bullshit as long these people present the facts. A baseball fan wants to see the product on the field, warts and all. I don't know why these guys go to such great lengths to blot it out.

This story's explosion yesterday actually was a very interesting lesson in modern communications, but there's no way I could adequately analyze it in the time and space I have here. The mystery, to me, was how Gordon Edes could have been aware of Thorne's comments -- generally, the sound of the TV broadcasts is muted in the press box, and if it wasn't, Edes wouldn't have been the only reporter to hear it -- but come to find out it was old friend Allan Wood who heard it first and sent the word out to Edes and several other sports writers. A global village, indeed.